Early update

Just over a week in and I am already exhausted. The days have been long and intense yet mostly very enjoyable. I have been arriving at work at 7.30am and leaving anywhere between 4.00 - 6.00pm. On top of this, of course, I have been taking work home with me. This sort of schedule and workload will inevitably take it's toll but I remain determined to maintain it for as long as possible, for my benefit as well as my students'.

Having seen all of my classes at least twice, I am now more convinced than ever that things do become easier the longer a teacher sticks with one school. This year I am teaching a total of seven different classes, of varying age groups and ability levels. I am keen to stress that it is still very, very early - too early - to make any solid judgements but I am cautiously optimistic that only one of these classes will present significant problems. Most of the students in the tricky class were with me last year and therefore I am well aware of the chaos that they are capable of creating. This situation has been compounded by the fact that, as our department's resident skull cracker, - Mr HOD is rather incompetent and Mrs F, who replaced Mrs J, is still settling in - several well-known maniacs have been added to my register. The girls in this class are particularly nasty, many of whom have been temporarily excluded on numerous occasions for offences ranging from truancy, bullying, verbal abuse of staff and physical abuse of other students. It will be a long, thankless year with them. My hope is that the strong positives I envisage with the rest of my classes will far outweigh this solitary negative. And besides, I have seen and dealt with it all countless times before.